Sadie Creese is on a mission to keep us safe

This article was taken from the October 2013 issue of Wired
magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before
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Sadie Creese is on a mission to keep us safe. "Most people
understand the need to lock their car or front door, but don't know
how to relate that to cyberspace," says Creese, director of the
Global Centre for Cyber Security Capacity-Building at Oxford
University's Oxford Martin School, a research centre that opens
next month. She sees the complexity of online systems and the sheer scale of data we're creating as opening us up to
unrecognised risks. "Can your smart car get hacked? What about
banking, social networking, TV-watching? Are you safe? This is what
we want to understand," explains Creese, 39. "We want to know, if
you're in Ghana, what should you do to protect yourself from cyber
threat, versus what the UK should be doing, versus the
international community."

Creese started her career as a computer scientist, then worked
for the UK Ministry of Defence and security company QinetiQ, before returning to academia in 2007. Her Oxford group
consists of mathematicians, computer scientists, psychologists,
crimin-ologists and economists. Projects in development include a
tool called Cyber Viz, which will help companies visualise their
incoming cyber-security alerts and decide which are most urgent.
She recently launched a project making tools to protect companies
from insider online threats. "A lot of current security tools are
designed to control entry," she says. "But that's no use
against insiders."

Ultimately, Creese wants
to create a visual, real-time depiction of the entire movement.
"We're working on how you can visualise the whole of cyberspace to
enable humans to better see risk as it occurs," she says. "We are
trying to make this space much more tangible."